ABSTRACT
By commonsense psychology, I do not have in mind primarily the conscious beliefs of everyday psychological life. Psychoanalysis has shown many of these to be false. Indeed, at this level, if common sense and psychoanalysis coincide, it is probably by accident, as a colleague
once said to me. Rather, I mean the interpretive, sense-making apparatus that commonsense psychology provides —the vast resource of largely unconscious principles, precepts, rules, and skills for recognizing and inferring psychological states from behavior and other psychological states, the body of knowledge every competent language user has available to make sense of him-or herself and others. This resource is what allows us to infer that someone is angry when we observe him or her shouting and red in the face, that someone wants to be comforted when he or she cries or moans, that someone is experiencing pleasure when he or she laughs, becomes animated, and so on. We have many thousands of such recognitional and inferential tools at our disposal. Given how adept even very young babies are at recognizing forms as human and at inferring humans’ emotional states, probably at least part of this resource is innate.
